Franziska Schroeder

The pontydian performance: The performative layer

In this paper we reflect on the performer–instrument relationship by turning towards the thinking practices of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961). Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological idea of the body as being at the centre of the world highlights an embodied position in the world and bestows significance onto the body as a whole, onto the body as a lived body. In order to better understand this two-way relationship of instrument and performer, we introduce the notion of the performative layer, which emerges through strategies for dealing with discontinuities, breakdowns and the unexpected in network performance.

Categorizations of physical gesture in piano teaching: A preliminary enquiry

The significance of the “physicality” involved in learning to play a musical instrument and the essential role of teachers are areas in need of research. This article explores the role of gesture within teacher–student communicative interaction in one-to-one piano lessons. Three teachers were required to teach a pre-selected repertoire of two contrasting pieces to three students studying piano grade 1. The data was collected by video recordings of piano lessons and analysis based on the type and frequency of gestures employed by teachers in association to teaching behaviours specifying where gestures fit under (or evade) predefined classifications. Spontaneous co-musical gestures were observed in the process of piano tuition emerging with similar general communicative purposes as spontaneous co-verbal gestures and were essential for the process of musical communication between teachers and students. Observed frequencies of categorized gestures varied significantly between different teaching behaviours and between the three teachers. Parallels established between co-verbal and co-musical spontaneous gestures lead to an argument for extension of McNeill’s (2005) ideas of imagery–language–dialectic to imagery–music–dialectic with relevant implications for piano pedagogy and fields of study invested in musical communication.

Wearable music in engaging technologies

We address the relationship between a music performer and her instrument as a possible model for re-thinking wearable technologies. Both musical instruments and textiles invite participation and by engaging with them we intuitively develop a sense of their malleability, resistance and fragility. In the action of touching we not only sense, but more importantly we react. We adjust the nature of our touch according to a particular material’s property. In this paper we draw on musical practice as it suggests attitudes of specificity rather than adaptability. This practice exposes the design of generalised “multi-use” devices, such as the all-in-one electronic organ, as rooted in utilitarian thinking. We argue that this tendency ignores the complexities of musical cultures and thus fails to provide technologies, which provoke creative action rather than aim for the promise of control and efficiency.

The Voice as Transcursive Inscriber: The Relation of Body and Instrument Understood through the Workings of a Machine

This article examines the relationship of the body with a musical instrument; specifically it looks at the vital threshold conditions that occur during the interplay of voice and instrument. By examining the work ‘IKAS’ (1982) for solo saxophone by German composer Hans-Joachim Hespos, the unusual timbral relationships created between vocal and instrumental sounds are exposed. I argue that this particular work highlights the performer/instrument relation as one marked by Gilles Deleuzes notion of the workings of a machine and a machines relation to a ‘flow’, in particular a machines function with view to the break in the flow. By turning towards Deleuzes concept of the machine, this article offers a slightly different vocabulary for music analysis, one that more easily encompasses certain works of the twentieth century, specifically those that are more timbre- than pitch-based.

Communicating musical knowledge through gesture: Piano teachers’ gestural behaviours across different levels of student proficiency

Teachers’ communication of musical knowledge through physical gesture represents a valuable pedagogical field in need of investigation. This exploratory case study compares the gestural behaviour of three piano teachers while giving individual lessons to students who differed according to piano proficiency levels. The data was collected by video recordings of one-to-one piano lessons and gestures were categorized using two gesture classifications: the spontaneous co-verbal gesture classification (McNeill, 1992; 2005) and spontaneous co-musical gesture classification (Simones, Schroeder & Rodger, 2013). Poisson regression analysis and qualitative observation suggest a relationship between teachers’ didactic intentions and the types of gesture they produced while teaching, as shown by differences in gestural category frequency between teaching students of higher and lower levels of proficiency. Such reported agreement between teachers’ gestural approach in relation to student proficiency levels indicates a teachers’ gestural scaffolding approach whereby teachers adapted gestural communicative channels to suit students’ specific conceptual skill levels.

Dramaturgy as a Model for Geographically Displaced Collaborations: Views from Within and Views from Without 1

The network is currently not only widely used for performative actions, but also extensively theorised. However, the artistic strategies in networked environments and the ways in which these new performance practices and cultural contexts can give rise to new design approaches have not been equally explored. This article therefore investigates the notion of dramaturgy as it provides a useful framework for addressing design strategies and performative relationships in networked environments. It is argued that dramaturgies suggest a robust method for understanding artistic practices in the network. The author refers to two different viewpoints that emerge in networked practice, which are entitled ‘views from within’ and ‘views from without’. The article gives a brief overview of the history and the theories of the network. It then looks at the histories of dramaturgies in order to better understand artistic strategies, and in order to enhance collaborative work in network performance environments.

Performing the Order: The messiness of play

Modernist tradition, as represented by the artistic output of the first half of the twentieth century, preoccupies itself with structure. Much of the music, architecture and visual art produced in the 1940s and 1950s relies on the identification and categorization of elements, which form relationships according to a largerform structure – the order of the grid. Music and architecture provide us with two prime examples of the development of the grid metaphor: serialism in music composition and grid-architecture as seen in the work of the architect Le Corbusier.

Seeing How It Sounds: Observation, Imitation, and Improved Learning in Piano Playing

ABSTRACT This study centers upon a piano learning and teaching environment in which beginners and intermediate piano students (N = 48) learning to perform a specific type of staccato were submitted to three different (group-exclusive) teaching conditions: audio-only demonstration of the musical task; observation of the teachers action demonstration followed by student imitation (blocked observation); and observation of the teachers action demonstration while alternating imitation of the task with the teachers performance (interleaved observation). Students submitted to interleaved observation were more proficient at the learned task with no significant differences for students of different proficiency levels.

Shifting Listening Identities – Towards a Fluidity of Form in Digital Music

The discourse surrounding listening has received vast theoretical attention for decades, but there has been a particular trend towards a re-examination of listening over the last ten years, highlighting a shift that moves listening to a broader understanding of musical experience. Eminent writers such as Steven Connor (2001), Jean-Luc Nancy (2002), Jonathan Sterne (2003), Michael Bull and Les Back (2003), Veit Erlmann (2004), Eric Clarke (2005), Pauline Oliveros (2005, 2006), Marshall McLuhan (2006), Alex Ross (2008, 2010), Georgina Born (2010), and more recently Salome Voegelin (2010), have all examined modes of listening from various angles and viewpoints. In her article ‘Listening, Mediation, Event: Anthropological and Sociological Perspectives’, Born (2010) suggests that listening be seen as an experience that results from, and engenders, mediation affected by social and cultural location and identities. She thus highlights questions of the ‘encultured, affective, corporeal and located nature of musical experience’ (2010: 89). Similarly, in 2007 the composer/improvisor George Lewis made the argument for listening as a mode essentially linked to the body and thus deeply tied listening to action when stating that listening is ‘a practice of active engagement with the world, where we sift, interpret, store and forget, in parallel with action and fundamentally linked with it’ (Lewis, 2007: 113). Listening is understood as a mode of exploration, a constantly changing mediation between subjects and objects, in which we actively seek, sift, select, rather than as a mode of simple reception. Salome Voegelin’s recent book Listening to Noise and Silence: Toward a Philosophy of Sound Art (2010) supports this way of thinking. Several writers delineate the mode of listening from the mode of hearing (see Erlmann, 2004; or Nancy, 2002, for example), while others recall the ongoing ‘eye versus ear’ debate (the often assumed dominance of the visual over the aural), an argument that Don Ihde outlined in 1976, and which was revived in 1985 when in his work Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1985), Jacques Attali stated:

The Body Skinned: Rethinking performative presence

For centuries the skin has been subject to tender fascination and caressing obsession. Didier Anzieu (1995/1985: 34) describes the skin as ‘an almost inexhaustible subject of research, care and discourse’. It is not only the largest and heaviest organ of the body, an organ that ‘combines together different organs, senses, the spatial and the temporal dimension, sensitivity to heat, balance [and] movement’ (Segal 2006: 4), but also, the skin according to Anzieu (1995/1985) is the basic reference point for all the various sense data. Segal argues that we can live without other senses, but not without the skin. Thus, we present ourselves to the world as fronted by the skin and we conceive of our body as one that is dressed in that particular cover. The skin becomes an indicator of our mood and well-being; we feel good, comfortable or uncomfortable in our skin. According to Connor, the skin has always been in sight, but has never been so in view as it is today. Connor (2002: 2) argues that the skin is becoming visible on its own account; not only in the obsessive display of its surfaces and forms in cinema and photography, in the massive efforts to control and manipulate its appearance by means of cosmetics and plastic surgery, the extraordinary investment in the skin in practices and representations associated with fetishism and sadomasochism, but also in the anxious concern with the abject frailty and vulnerability of the skin, and the destructive rage against it exercised in violent fantasies and representations of all kinds.’1 If the skin is so much in view as it is today, it is worth pointing out that for a long time there existed an inattention to the skin. The skin was largely seen as a covering that kept the body together, something that maintained the integrity of the body.2 When the taboo of cutting the skin in the European Renaissance was released it was primarily to gain access to the interior of the body. The skin was something one needed to get past, the focus being towards the incision and retraction of the skin to get inside the body. Jonathan Sawday (1995: 3) refers to this moment of early-modern Europe as the ‘culture of dissection’, and it was a moment that was triggered in particular by the Belgian physician Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564).3 Vesalius’ work De humanis corporis fabrica Libri septem (1543) was revolutionary in that prior to this moment the medical profession had relied on inferences from animal dissections, as dissections of the human body had not been possible (Sawday 1995). Throughout the Medieval period, the skin became to be seen as an organ of interchange, a permeable membrane; the skin was understood to be ‘traversable in two directions’ (Connor 2004: 21) and its functions (sweating for example) were taken into consideration as being crucial for maintaining the body’s well-being. If at first the skin was seen as a covering, it was consequently thought of more as an organ in itself, with its own structure and functions. Contemporary thinking exposes the multiplying functions of the skin. The skin is understood as The Body Skinned Rethinking performative presence